If you can tolerate the humiliation and helplessness and admit that you’re an out-of-control fuckup, it frees you from expectations you can’t possibly meet, promises you can’t keep, and appearances you can’t maintain; it liberates you from the ensuing cycle of endless failure. It doesn’t free you, of course, from your standards or your determination to be as least fucked-up as possible given your new, self-acknowledged fuckup status.
As soon as you accept who you are, think hard about the standards you want to live up to and less about looking normal, pleasing authorities, or competing with others. Use those standards to manage your inner fuckup by redoubling your efforts to learn whatever you really care about and manage bad behavior.
Rely on your own standards for defining hard work, reliability, and self-reliance, and use your gifts to achieve them in your own way. If your career happens to lack prestige or follows an unconventional, restless path, don’t criticize yourself. Respect yourself all the more for having found a way to meet standards using equipment you didn’t choose and given habits that are hard to break.
Remember, fucking up doesn’t mean getting bad results; it means not doing your best with what you’ve got. As long as you’ve developed values you believe in, and have reason to think you’re doing your best to work at living up to them, you’ll always be a success, even if learning you’ve got a wacky brain is hard to swallow.
Quick Diagnosis
Here’s what you wish for and can’t have:
• On-demand concentration and focus
• Not acting stupid
• Good results whenever you work hard and deserve them
• Not feeling scared shitless before you can start working
Here’s what you can aim for and actually achieve:
• Define for yourself what’s necessary to get done
• Find your own ways for doing and delegating what’s necessary
• Know you’ve done your best, regardless of result
• Take pride in your ability to work with what you’ve got
Here’s what you can do:
• Test yourself, or get tested by a neuropsychologist, on information-processing problems, and give yourself a Myers-Briggs test to gain a feel for your permanent personality traits and the strengths and weaknesses that go with them
• Get help from whatever teachers and coaches are most positive about you and have the best tricks for helping you perform better
• Avoid friends who understand you but nevertheless overreact to your fuckups because they’re too much like you, and embrace friends who, even if they don’t understand your fuckups, aren’t terribly bothered by them
• Try medication if nonmedical methods aren’t enough
• Find a spouse who’s good at doing your taxes
Your Script
Dear [Me/Family Member/Guy I’ve Disappointed, Let Down, or Royally Screwed],
I know you feel I’ve [fucked up/dropped the ball/ignored my deadline/deserve my trial date and possible jail time]. Let me assure you, however, that nothing is more important to me than [doing a good job/keeping my commitments/not disappointing you/staying off MSNBC’s Lockup] and that I am now doing my best to [figure out what happened/make amends if possible/never screw up this bad again]. I know that one reason for the problem is that I cannot [insert basic skill, like time-telling or direction-following], but I’m aware of that weakness and have developed systems for preventing it from interfering with the job. I will learn from this experience and continue to try to fulfill my commitments. [Insert long, sincere string of apologetic words, followed by silent prayer.]
No matter how much evidence accumulates that our potential for addictions of all kinds (controlled substances, sex, edible substances, Internet, horrible people) owes more to causes we don’t control, like our genes, than those we do, we continue to experience addictions as moral failures and respond accordingly. Usually, that response means hiding the addiction and condemning others who have it—at least if you’re in politics.
We don’t control the genetic factors that make some people more vulnerable than others to chemical dependence, or the ADD that makes some people more impulsive, or the childhood experiences that make us yearn for bad relationships and avoid the unfamiliarity of good ones. It’s just easier to act like we do so we have someone to blame, instead of admitting we’re all helpless specks in the universe.
Once you can accept that life, in fact, sucks, and the tons of bad stuff to be born and/or stuck with is distributed unevenly, unfairly, and undeservedly, recovery from addiction becomes much less impossible.
In other words, getting unaddicted, or even just less addicted, does not begin with self-criticism, punishment, or hoping that urges to do bad things will ever go away, but with acceptance of the fact that they’re there, you need all your strength to deal with them, and you can’t waste it on self-blame, false hope, or despair and self-pity.
Some people believe your best opportunity for change comes after an addiction causes you to “hit bottom” and lose everything you value. The trouble is, there’s a vicious cycle to addiction that increases your dependence on bad things as you lose your hold on what you value. The worse you feel about life and yourself, the more you think of nothing but immediate relief or pleasure. Addiction can be a bottomless pit that sucks you down harder the farther you fall, leaving you with an addiction as bottomless, and as appetizing, as a salad bowl at Olive Garden.
Some people believe that conquering addiction starts with your becoming aware of the anger and pain your addiction causes loved ones, and if you’ve been unaware, of course this knowledge helps. Often, however, an intervention doesn’t teach anyone anything new, and the best way to get rid of the guilt your addiction causes others is to get even more fucked-up. Then you find yourself getting sober for others instead of for yourself, which allows you to hold them responsible for keeping you sober, and justifies getting high again when they disappoint you.
Trying to make bad impulses go away, or to scare or cry or communicate them into submission, usually doesn’t work and may actually increase your neediness and drive you back to your addictions. Long story short, most of what you’ve seen on Intervention doesn’t fly in real life.
Instead, improvement begins with acceptance of the permanence of what’s wrong and a realization that there are, nevertheless, good reasons for pushing yourself to manage flaws that will never stop being a painful burden.
As everyone in recovery knows, there’s no moment of victory and absolute, eternal sobriety. Success over addiction means knowing why being unaddicted is worthwhile, and trying as hard as you can to stay that way, no matter how harsh the truth of your past, present, or future may be.
Here are the signs that you’re addicted and stuck:
• You want to understand the root of your addiction (see above)
•